sojourner

You don't see that jagged line in the first picture? Looks like the tank cracked.

Woot! Hey, Does it bug anyone that because of the way KSP fudges ISP/TWR that nuclear engines don't actually produced the claimed TWR in an atmosphere? Makes designing landers using nuke engines difficult to test on Kerbin.

Then I can't help you.

Yeah, no damage at all.

It ain't flying again. Scroll down in this article to see close ups of the damage: http://www.universetoday.com/128932/2-sea-1-land-3rd-recovered-booster-joins-spacex-siblings-close-gallery/

If we are going to get into some deep dissection of Musk's Tweet, I don't think he would have qualified "testing" with the word "ground" in front of it unless he meant it won't fly again. If he thought they might fly it again why waste the precious twitter characters?

"life leader for ground tests" It's not flying again.

Elon Musk Verified account ‏@elonmusk Most recent rocket took max damage, due to v high entry velocity. Will be our life leader for ground tests to confirm others are good. Retweets 1,074 Likes 4,716 4:08 PM - 15 May 2016

Two out of those three have already been written off as not flying again.

You've just stumbled upon ULA's Aces upper stage concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage

^Blue Origin has reflown their rocket 2 times now. The Falcon 9 originally was going to use chutes and a wet landing. SpaceX found that reserving some fuel and adding legs weighed less than the chutes would have and provided for pinpoint landings. Coincidentally, the Falcon 9 can lift around 22000kg. About the same as the final configuration of Saturn -1b. So, Your thought experiment is actually in production and flying after a fashion

The last landing had live footage from the booster looking down, so there should be footage of the reentry.

The engine is out. You only have so many restarts with the Merlin, so shutting it off to dump fuel is not going to work as a way to throttle thrust.Unless your goal is to you know, shut down the engine, then it's sort of pointless to be dumping fuel to reduce thrust in the first place.

Um, aircraft don't have open combustion taking place where you'd be dumping that fuel and pure oxygen from. Unless of course we're talking about afterburners which sort of defeats the purpose intended in this conversation.

Where would you have that shunted fuel and oxygen go? That wouldn't result in uncontrolled combustion in a place you don't want it? Besides, the issue isn't with being able to control how much runs through the turbo pumps to get your throttle range, it's how much minimal fuel/oxygen is burning in the bell before you get a flame out/coking.

The question is how deep can it throttle?

Don't presume that just because it takes a few seconds for the engine bell to start to glow that the engine is not at full power.

Unlike KPS, in the real world rocket engines can't throttle down to %1. The fact that Elon has stated the Merlin can now throttle to %40 is really impressive.

Here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacex/ Yeah, I'm not talking about a little soot on the tankage, that engine bay looks toasted this time.

The hires images of the landed stage look pretty crispy. I don't think this one will be flying again without some heavy refurbishment. I think that post landing fire did more damage to the engine bay than they would have liked.

I''l just tell Elon to BYOC. Bring your own crane.

If you stand the stage up it is.

If Elon needs space to store used first stages I'll be more than happy to let him use my front yard to store one. Only 2 hours from the cape. Should keep those pesky neighbors from bothering me too.

Would be cool if they setup an always live webcam at the pad, but I guess they need their privacy for a lot of the work they do. Would want to give away sensitive information.

The success to failure ratio on returned stages is starting to change rapidly now.